Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...”

— Anne Sexton

152. “Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.”

— Anne Sexton

153. “The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives.”

— Anne Sexton

154. “To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.”

— Anne Sexton

155. “Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.”

— Anne Sexton

156. “That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry – poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow.”

— Anne Sexton

157. “I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.”

— Anne Sexton

158. “The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket...”

— Anne Sexton

159. “The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.”

— Anne Sexton

160. “When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.”

— Anne Sexton

161. “Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse.”

— Anne Sexton

162. “It’s all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.”

— Anne Sexton

163. “After a disaster strikes, it can be very devastating and very challenging. You’re going to need a lot of strength and energy, and the American Red Cross suggests you go for the high protein items.”

— Anne Sexton

164. “I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”

— Anne Sexton

165. “The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.”

— Anne Sexton

166. “I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.”

— Anne Sexton

167. “There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning...”

— Anne Sexton

168. “Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind.”

— Anne Sexton

169. “I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.”

— Anne Sexton

170. “The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.”

— Anne Sexton

171. “Some women marry houses. It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.”

— Anne Sexton

172. “We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!”

— Anne Sexton

173. “Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.”

— Anne Sexton

174. “The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.”

— Anne Sexton

175. “Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.”

— Anne Sexton

176. “The body is a damn hard thing to kill.”

— Anne Sexton

177. “When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.”

— Anne Sexton

178. “Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.”

— Anne Sexton

179. “I’ve grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by.”

— Anne Sexton

180. “True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.”

— Anne Sexton

181. “I am younger each year at the first snow.”

— Anne Sexton

182. “I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections...”

— Anne Sexton

183. “Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.”

— Anne Sexton

184. “For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.”

— Anne Sexton

185. “Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.”

— Anne Sexton

186. “Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.”

— Anne Sexton

187. “What’s missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.”

— Anne Sexton

188. “Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.”

— Anne Sexton

189. “And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.”

— Anne Sexton

190. “Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death...”

— Anne Sexton

191. “I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.”

— Anne Sexton

192. “Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins...”

— Anne Sexton

193. “The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.”

— Anne Sexton

194. “As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.”

— Anne Sexton

195. “Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!”

— Anne Sexton

196. “There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.”

— Anne Sexton

197. “Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?”

— Anne Sexton

198. “Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.”

— Anne Sexton

199. “All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!”

— Anne Sexton

200. “Pain engraves a deeper memory.”

— Anne Sexton